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Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Anything
- J. Allan Mitchell (author)
Chapter of: Speculative Medievalisms: Discography(pp. 143–157)
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| Title | Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Anything |
|---|---|
| Contributor | J. Allan Mitchell (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0021.1.14 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculative-medievalisms/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ |
| Copyright | Mitchell, J. Allan |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2013-01-17 |
| Long abstract | If it is a question of where to begin, medieval embryology and cosmogony answer speculatively, starting at the very begin-ning: they return the human to the site of so many primordial, intestinal involvements in the world—or rather, the very con-ception of worlds from “mere seeds and hopes,” as Ovid puts it in the Metamorphoses.1 At one end of the spectrum, embry-ological narratives effectively reverse engineer the organism, tracing back through time a fluid and concatenating series of molecular events, topological movements, and intensities that may be missed only because they result in such solid-seeming entities. In the fourteenth century, Nicole Oresme marvels at the contingencies involved in the process, expressing surprise that a human being comes about at all, since “error can hap-pen from many causes but only in one way can it complete all things successfully—and for this one way many things are required.” Even when things pan out, the wrenching epigenet-ic change undergone by the embryo is extreme: “between [Socrates] at his birth and at his maturity . . . there is surely a greater difference, if you consider it well, than there is be-tween a pig and a dog at birth, or between an ass and a horse or mule, or a crow and an eagle, or between a wolf and a dog, all of which are of different species.”2 It is as if the human were originally constituted as some kind of menagerie, espe-cially in light of the Aristotelian thesis that the embryo moves through successive stages of micro-speciation (vegetal, ani-mal, human). At the other end of the spectrum, medieval cosmogony regularly describes a cosmic birth that is equally fraught: an account of everything originally abandoned to chaotic flux before being resolved into the developed Ptolema-ism that we all associate with the Middle Ages. The methodo-logical challenge of beginning is the same, tarrying with semi-nal, gestational moments anterior to being. It is to speculate about what is not yet, rather than what is |
| Page range | pp. 143–157 |
| Print length | 15 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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